All that Glitters
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry" In which Tony has numerous good ideas for his protégé, and very little actual success. (Aunt May is also in this but she's not in the character list for some reason)
1. Chapter 1

Having Peter in the compound was great, no matter what Happy thought about it.

Tony had him for the fortnight, mostly to get him out of May's hair while school was out. That, and to prove himself capable of keeping the kid in one piece. Trust was important, and if that meant paying Happy time and a half to keep the kid from sticking his hands in heavy machinery, that was worth it.

They'd spent most of the afternoon tinkering in the workshop, in something like parallel play- the importance being in presence, rather than interaction. It counted, just having Peter around, elbows-deep and hyperfocused on his own work. Actual access to the resources he needed stirred him into a laser-like sort of concentration, and Tony loved to watch that happen.

But six o'clock had come and gone, and Peter'd been dragged back upstairs for food and exposure to sunlight.

Tony was flicking idly through the latest set of data on him. Someone had finally managed to bribe the kid into sitting through a medical assessment, and gotten much more in-depth than the standard temperature/heart rate/bpm readings he got from the suit. Surprisingly, some of the readings were skimming a little bit low. Tony wasn't sure how someone could eat an entire thing of oreos and skirt hypoglycemia within the hour, but apparently Peter had managed it.

" Bruce." Tony kicked off the wall, propelling his desk chair towards his colleague. "What do teenagers need?"

" What, like, psychologically?" Bruce had been working on a write-up of something related to his own wacky biology, and most of the surface area of his desk was lost beneath a forest of coffee mugs.

" Nutrition," Tony clarified. "I'm making Spider-Man a meal plan."

It turned out the answer was protein, and lots of it. Smoked salmon, steak, and prosciutto featured heavily in every conceivable combination. Tony recruited Jarvis to cross-reference the family library of cookbooks and Peter's calculated caloric and nutritional needs, and he was basically going to have to buy out a charcutier's. Steve's nutso enhanced body did something similar- healing and super-strength sank nutrients like nothing on earth.

After a few hours, spent in a haze of pinterest boards and recipe blogs, he was ready for the next step of his hastily-assembled plan- putting it into action.

He jogged down to the staffed kitchen, just in time to catch his head chef. He'd found Giulia in a hole-in-the-wall place in Modena and snapped her up before anyone else got the chance.

" Hey!" he said, leaning against the doorframe. "Do you do lunchboxes?"

* * *

" Does he think I don't _feed_ you?"

May turned the red and gold box over in her hands, frowning at the little note-card on the back. The fancy type was bragging about all of the overspecialized features it had. There were many, far better uses of the technology that went into self-cooling meal storage than sending unnecessary lunch boxes to her kid.

Peter shrugged.

" He probably just thinks you're not feeding me-" he picked up another one of the boxes, turning it over to read the back. "Uh, pastrami of Hudson Valley duck foi gras, with salanova lettuces, and young almonds, and pickled green strawberries. You can pickle strawberries?"

" You can pickle anything if you put your mind to it," May said, distracted. In the big, brown cardboard box- stamped with the Stark Industries logo- which the meals had arrived in, there were two envelopes. One addressed to each of them.

The letter made it a lot worse.

Suddenly deciding to feed someone's kid was _weird_ , but May could justify it as one of Stark's bizarre fits of charity. There was a clear cycle of guilt and giving. But the letter. Dear lord, the letter. The cheery condescension of it would have been bad enough, even if it hadn't focused entirely on her apparent failure to care for her kid. Colourful info-graphics detailed the acceptable ranges of a cherry-picked selection of vitamin values, and a red rectangle described, in monosyllables, the definition of anemia. There was nothing to even correct yet- all the numbers still looked fine, but apparently truffle oil and Piedmont hazelnuts were part of a "medically ideal" diet.

" I'm going to call him," she decided. Peter dropped the box he was trying to claw his way into.

" Don't!" he begged. "I think. Right, we should totally try this. I mean, I should try this. I might like it! And also it's free."

" I can afford _food_ , Peter," May protested, although 'free' was always a good point.

" Well yeah, but not for free," Peter said, turning over another box. "And not. Like. Squid ink spaccatelli." He squinted at the box for a moment. "What's spaccatelli?"

" It's a pasta," May said. She fidgeted with the leather strap of her watch, twisting it around her wrist.

She didn't hate Tony Stark. Not entirely. But the trust between them was- understandably, in her opinion- incredibly delicate, and the utter disregard for boundaries didn't exactly help reinforce it. She was perpetually two steps from a restraining order.

" May?" Peter momentarily deserted the shiny lunchboxes. "He did tell you about this, right?"

May shook her head.

" This is just as much of a surprise to me as it is to you."

" Oh." Peter wrinkled his nose, digging through the cardboard box. At least he was picking up on the weirdness of it. "Sorry."

* * *

Peter was not having a great day.

He'd missed the bus that morning, and been late to first period. In chemistry, he'd managed to get crystal violet on both his sleeves and his hands, and May was probably going to kill him for destroying another shirt, even though it hadn't been for spider-man reasons that time.

He was also coveting Ned's pizza.

Peter tried not to be distracted by the mouth-watering familiarity of school-cafeteria pepperoni. His own lunch was one of the simpler things Tony had inflicted on him recently- recognizably some kind of fish, and spinach, and some weird gooey sauce stuff, and shredded, multi-green mystery vegetable salad, all plopped down on top of quinoa. He sort of liked spinach, but he was very dubious on the rest.

The sauce- which was a gluey yellow, with suspicious flecks of green- turned out to be gross. It was like a cross-bred abomination somewhere between mayo, ranch, and a herb garden. Quinoa was already markedly disgusting; Peter had tried after one of May's monthly pilgrimages to Whole Foods, and the fact that it was stupidly expensive didn't counteract the fact that it literally made him want to throw up. He'd been excited about the weird rich people food at first, but now, he was seriously wishing he'd let May make that phone call. It didn't even seem to be helping - he didn't feel any less tired or annoyed at everything.

That might have been because he wasn't actually eating most of it.

He could handle things _tasting_ bad- he'd eat just about anything, based on that metric- but it was the texture that got to him. The mushy-flaky mouthfeel of meat cooked weirdly, the salty squish-pop of roe. Whoever was cooking for him could do some seriously troubling things with avocado.

But food was food. And breakfast had been supposed to be some weird array of bread and ham, and very quickly turned out to be just milk and a handful of lucky charms, grabbed on his way out the door. So really, he should have been eating it, and not just stabbing it into ever more uniform mush with his provided plastic fork.

" Dude," Ned said, breaking Peter from his wallowing. "You look like, really depressed."

" I haven't had a potato chip in _three weeks_ ," Peter answered. "Yesterday, I had a carrot and kiwi and kale smoothie. It had an _egg_ in it. Just, like, a totally raw egg. I can't trust anything not to be gross."

Ned considered that for a moment.

" I have an Uncrustable-" he began.

Peter reached across the table, grabbed Ned's hands. It wasn't lunch , but it was better than nothing.

"Ned," he said. "If you give me that Uncrustable, I will love you for the rest of my life."


	2. Chapter 2

Tony already regretted the restaurant - mostly because Peter's pre-intervention palate had been the sort to accommodate sidewalk cheetos. He regretted it further when the kid actually walked in.

He rose from the bench in the waiting area, waved, because Peter had that "tragic lost waif" look, and wandered over.

"Never ever wear that again," he said, by way of greeting. " Please ."

Peter's eyebrows drew together as he looked down at his outfit, like he'd forgotten what he was wearing, or (more likely) blocked it out as a form of psychological defense. Outside it was raining, and sad little rivulets of water ran down from his wet hair, dripping on to the criminal offense of a shirt he'd chosen.

The screen-printed, flaking star of a viral video- which had been everywhere, about three years ago- beamed out from a background of vibrant green. Over it, he wore a bright yellow windbreaker, and the complete look was best described as a lemon-lime trainwreck. He hadn't even managed to find decent shoes. His grungy brown every-day sneakers were soaked through, oozing muddy water on the lobby marble, as were the ragged cuffs of his jeans.

"I think it's fine?" Peter said, crossing his arms in defiance, and with a great deal of noisy swishing.

Clearly this was some sort of revenge. Peter normally dressed like he'd been stranded in a Goodwill for a decade, but this was a new low. And it had to be deliberate; they were outside, a very select group of people would see them, and there would be consequences to Peter looking like a neon drifter, even at eight in the morning.

Or, the more depressing alternative: he didn't have anything better to pick from.

"Fine," Tony parroted, dumbfounded. "Okay, you know what? Screw the reservation. I'm calling Happy. We're going to Denny's."

" Hell yeah, " Peter said, his early-morning crabbiness finally starting to wear off. "I love Denny's."

Well.

At least this was fixable.

* * *

Peter got home from school to a perfectly clean room.

Which was very, very odd.

He slowly lowered his backpack to the floor, like the carpet itself was rigged to explode. May didn't clean his room, because it had been his responsibility since second grade.

At a second glance, though, it wasn't the entire room that'd been cleaned. It was just clothes . The laundry basket was empty. The chair which was perpetually heaped with semi-clean shirts was exposed to the light again, and his shoes- which could be anywhere in the room at any given point- were gone.

A cheery pink Post-It note on the wardrobe called "open me! :)" in familiar handwriting.

Peter approached the closet. This looked incredibly trap-like, to the point where a big neon sign declaring it a trap would have been more subtle, but he wasn't picking up on any actual danger. Maybe he was just about to be seriously pranked.

He yanked open the door and swiftly sidestepped, just in case, before peering in to see…

Shirts. Shirts and a few jackets.

But not his shirts.

Peter pawed through them for a few moments, pausing to feel the strange fabrics, a growing anxiety rising in his chest. Even the hangars were different. He kept hoping he'd find something he actually owned in with all the fancy jackets and silk shirts, but he had no such luck.

The chest of drawers was the same, all neatly folded clothes that were entirely unfamiliar. Pajamas with little embroidered sailboats and stripes, egyptian-cotton undershirts and argyle socks that somehow involved straps. And nothing he had owned before.

His heart sank. Tony'd really gotten rid of everything.

Peter made a last-ditch attempt at digging through the drawers, uprooting the perfectly-folded sweaters and shirts, looking for one, because he could just about handle losing the rest of his hand-me-downs. It felt stupid to be so upset over a sweatshirt but he wanted it back, desperately, because it was a constant; because he'd gotten used to swaddling himself in it whenever he was sad- because it was a link to the past.

He wasn't sure where to go, from there. He paced- across the floor and up the wall, barely noticing the change in gravity.

It wasn't fair on Tony to get mad. This wasn't a malicious act- if anything, it was an extremely kind one. It wasn't Tony's fault that Peter had an issue with it. But the storm of emotions inside him was getting hard to ignore. Tony- or more likely, his people - had been in his room. A space that was supposed to be private. Gone through and taken his things.

There was a petty, childish part of him that wanted to believe that those things eclipsed the charity.

But he was better than that.

Wasn't he?

* * *

Peter had been summoned out to the compound, in response to a storm of moderately passive-aggressive texts he'd sent. Which meant he was probably in trouble, because Mr. Stark basically only ever actually talked to him when he was in trouble or about to be surprise-gifted something, and the latter didn't seem very likely.

He wandered through what felt like endless corridors in his pinchy new shoes, before he got to his destination: Function Room 4, announced as such by silver lettering on a little glass plaque. He raised a hand to knock on the door, before realising how dumb that was, and entering anyway.

"Hey there," Tony Stark was standing in the middle of the room, distracted and texting. Spread across the floor were rows and rows of shirts and trousers. "I caught your little tantrum, by the way. Which is why we're gonna try and be constructive here."

He was wearing a dark, pinstriped blazer, the defining piece in what was effectively a more grown-up version of Peter's current outfit.

"Oh." Peter scanned the floor, looking for his grey sweatshirt. Nothing seemed to be missing, thank god- but he couldn't pick it out.

"I'm guessing that you and I have very different definitions of 'fitting', so we're going to start by taking out everything with holes or stains." When Peter didn't move, he clicked his fingers. "C'mon kiddo, I didn't take these out of storage just for you to stare at them."

"Everything I got you is tailored, you notice that? I got your measurements from Karen. Cute name, by the way," Tony said, once Peter had started moving through the rows and sorting things in to keep, chuck, maybe. "Off-the-rack is really unflattering on you."

Peter didn't answer, because he'd found the sweater. He plucked it off the floor and considered putting it on- over his stupid cable-knit cardigan- before tying it around his waist. In his peripheral vision, frowned, and Peter broke in before he could say anything.

"This was my uncle's," he explained. "I'd really like to keep it, even if I can't wear it anymore."

Tony nodded, his mouth a grim line.

"I'm sorry." he said. "Is there anything else I need to know about?"

Peter shook his head, and Tony fell back into silence, picking through clothes and occasionally frowning at something he found particularly distasteful.

When Peter moved to put another shirt- his Pokémon tank top, which he liked - in the 'keep' pile, though, he spoke up.

"Oh, you don't want that ," he said. "You're not five."

Peter grit his teeth, and flung the shirt into the heap of other rejects.

Clearly, there would be compromises.


End file.
